Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Climate talks complicated by China revelation that it burns much more coal than reported, size of correction is immense, almost a billion tons more CO2 a year, more than entire German economy. Data has been wrong since 2000, misreporting also took place in 1990s-NY Times

Even for a country of China’s
size, the scale of the correction is immense.The sharp upward revision
in official figures means that China has released much more carbon
dioxide — almost a billion more tons a year according to initial
calculations — than previously estimated.

The
Chinese government has promised to halt the growth of its emissions of
carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse pollutant from coal and other fossil
fuels, by 2030. The new data suggest that the task of meeting that
deadline by reducing China’s dependence on coal will be more daunting
and urgent than expected, said Yang Fuqiang, a former energy official in China who now advises the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“This
will have a big impact, because China has been burning so much more
coal than we believed,” Mr. Yang said. “It turns out that it was an even
bigger emitter than we imagined. This helps to explain why China’s air
quality is so poor, and that will make it easier to get national leaders
to take this seriously.”

Illustrating
the scale of the revision, the new figures add about 600 million tons
to China’s coal consumption in 2012 — an amount equivalent to more than
70 percent of the total coal used annually by the United States................

“It’s been a confusing situation for a long time,” said Ayaka Jones, a China analyst at the United States Energy Information Administration in Washington. She said the new data vindicated her earlier analysis of China’s preliminary statistics, which flagged significantly increased numbers for coal use and overall energy consumption.

The
new data indicated that much of the change came from heavy industry —
including plants that produce coal chemicals and cement, as well as
those using coking coal, which goes to make steel, Ms. Jones said. The
correction for coal use in electric power generation was much smaller.

Officials
accepted the need to correct worsening distortions in the old data but
have not commented publicly on the changes, according to Lin Boqiang,
director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research
at Xiamen University in eastern China. Mr. Lin said in a telephone
interview that this was partly because the new figures made it more
complicated to set and assess the country’s clean-energy goals.

When President Xi Jinping
proposed that China’s emissions stop growing by 2030, he did not say
what level they would reach by then. The new numbers may mean that the
peak will be higher, but they also raise hopes that emissions will crest
many years sooner, Mr. Yang, the climate adviser, said.

“I
think this implies that we’re closer to a peak, because there’s also
been a falloff in coal consumption in the past couple of years,” he
said.

Chinese energy and statistics agency officials did not respond to faxed requests for comment on the data revisions. The
press office of the International Energy Agency said by email that the
organization would revise its own data to reflect China’s revisions,
starting with numbers for 2011 to 2013 that will be released Wednesday.
The agency estimated, based on the new figures, that China’s carbon
dioxide pollution in 2011 and 2012 was 4 percent to 6 percent greater
than previously thought.

But some scientists said the difference could be much larger. Jan Ivar Korsbakken,
a senior researcher at the Center for International Climate and
Environmental Research in Oslo, said that based on his preliminary
analysis, the new data implied that China had released about 900 million
metric tons more carbon dioxide from 2011 to 2013.

That would be an 11 percent increase in emissions, he said. For comparison, the International Energy Agency estimated
before the revision that China had emitted 8.25 billion tons of carbon
dioxide from fossil fuels in 2012. Dr. Korsbakken, a physicist,
emphasized that deeper analysis of the new data was needed before firm
conclusions could be drawn.

Economists
have grown increasingly skeptical about the economic data China
publishes, and the revisions open a new episode in the debate over its
energy use and greenhouse-gas emissions.............

China’s
emissions — 4.2 billion metric tons in 2013, according to the new data —
now far exceed those of any other country, including the United States,
the second-largest emitter................

This
is not the first time China has underestimated its coal consumption. In
the late 1990s, small coal mines were ordered to close, but many of
them simply stopped reporting their output to the government. For a
time, this created an erroneous impression that China had succeeded in generating economic growth without increasing emissions............

More recently, some scientists concluded that China’s emissions were lower
than widely believed because the coal it was using was of lower quality
and burned less efficiently than researchers had generally assumed. But
Mr. Yang said that conclusion had been disputed.

The
revised numbers do not alter scientists’ estimates of the total amount
of carbon dioxide in the air. That is measured directly, not inferred
from fuel consumption statistics the way countries’ emissions are
usually estimated...............

So
if China’s emissions have been much greater than believed, researchers
will want to understand where the extra carbon dioxide output ended up —
for example, how it might have been absorbed in natural “sinks” like
forests or oceans, said Josep G. Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project, which studies the sources and flows of greenhouse-gas pollution.